Finding the scent

Well, I’m sucking at this NaBloPoMo thing. It’s now the 17th of the month and I’ve only written 10 entries. That means I’ve missed a week’s worth of entries. In some ways I’m surprised by this; it’s not as if I’ve got a wild social life that’s taking up a ton of time. In other ways, it’s pretty much par for the course.

Loathesome Job has had a lot of deleterious effects on my personality over the past 8 months. In order to survive, to keep my spleen from exploding from both astonishment and outrage I’ve had to spend a lot of mental and emotional energy detaching:

I have learned not to care about the fact that virtually everyone I work with has a rampant case of not my job-itis.

I have learned not to care that the person who is ostensibly in charge of making the websites my group works on good thinks that making the experience pleasant for the user is the same as making sure someone who is blind can access the site at all.

I have learned, mostly, to stifle my bullshit alarm when Management sends a note out saying that the IT guy will be around to install webcams on all our computers but it’s not so they can watch us during the work day.

I have learned to accept that I’ve been given what is essentially a window watcher job because Management has such a need to control its staff that they’d rather waste my talents than give someone on the “content” side “technical” tasks.

I’ve detached so well that things that used to really bother me merit merely a weary shrug these days. I can’t seem to get exercised about or involved in virtually anything.

It does not help that it is midnight outside at 5pm. It does not help that I work in a 12 ft x 8 ft cubicle jammed into an interior room with 14 other 12 ft x 8 ft cubicles. It does not help that when I do make it out of my office building there is nothing, and I mean nothing, stimulating in the vicinity. It does not help that almost my entire support system, anemic as it is, exists no where near me physically (not to mention the fact that everyone in my support system is dealing with their own problems right now).

Manhunter, 1986

There’s this great scene in the movie Manhunter, in fact it’s the first time we meet Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox). Will Graham (William Petersen) has brought the files from the Toothfairy case to Lecktor ostensibly to get the doctor’s opinion on the killer’s motives and methods.

Lecktor realizes that Graham isn’t actually there to get his opinion on the case. No, Graham is there to get the old scent back, to get back into the mindset that allowed him to catch Lecktor in the first place.

I’m afraid that I’ve detached so well that I’ve become detached not only from life but from who I am and what I want. I’m even more afraid that I won’t be able to get my own scent back.